In considering whether men will run machines or vice versa, Liston holds forth discursively on a staggering variety of interrelated problems; poverty, oil supply and prices, stagflation, exotic weapons, taxes, and triage are only a few of the larger ones. It all leads up to the doomsday prediction (since modified) of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, whose arguments as well as those against it are duly summarized here. Neither hot air nor questionable generalizations are totally absent from his typical all-encompassing YA survey. Perhaps just raising the issues at this level is enough, but none of the separate topics are new to the YA literature and as for general conclusions, Liston comes to no coherent or insightful ones.